Taiwan must cooperate with other Asia-Pacific democracies
to form a defense network to prevent North Korea from importing weaponry, due
to the possibility of that country becoming a major source of chaos in Asia, a
senior scholar of a US think tank said in Taipei yesterday.

"It is
necessary to overthrow North Korea's autocratic government and it is also necessary
to put pressure on China not to continually nurture the North Korean government,"
said Max Boot, an Olin Senior Fellow of National Security Studies in the US-based
Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot was invited to speak at the first annual
meeting of the Democratic Pacific Assembly (DPA), which was launched on Friday.
He put forward his point of view about Taiwan's role in the Asia-Pacific rim during
a session entitled "major threats to human security."

The assembly
was set to discuss how to integrate all democracies of the Asia-Pacific rim into
an organization and a mechanism to enhance regional security, as well as how to
effect the liberalization of non-democratic nations.

Boot first praised
Taiwan's democratic achievement and said that Taiwan's experience can affect China's
democratization.

Noting that North Korea refused to accept the international
nuclear weapon agreement, Boot said that the country will cause turmoil in Asia
and therefore the international community have to adopt effective measures against
this possible development.

He stressed that WMD such as nuclear and biochemical
weapons pose the most severe threat to human society as a whole, and Taiwan, Japan
and the US are countries specifically threatened by missile attacks from North
Korea.

"For this reason those countries have to spend much more resources
to enhance their defensive abilities," Boot said.

Nations which develop
nuclear weapons, such as Russia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea have been monitored,
but some of them still refused to obey international nuclear-weapons agreements,
Boot said.

"They should be more strongly pressured," he said,
"for example, the international community can facilitate cooperation between
Taiwan, Japan, the US, Australia and South Korea to completely cut the supply
of weaponry to North Korea."

Boot said that the US government will
not ignore a nation's security suffering under a neighbor's threat, and "if
China's government continues to support North Korea in developing nuclear weapons,
the US government must implement a policy to pressure against China."

"Moreover,
to defend the threat from North Korea, all democracies in the Asia-Pacific region
should unite, and, if necessary, overthrow the current autocracy in North Korea,"
he said.